Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [130]
But where does it stop? We live in an age when technology is increasingly blurring the line between what was once thought to be private and what is now public information about our most intimate selves. That’s causing wrenching adjustments in the way we think about the boundaries between ourselves and our society. In England, for example, the introduction of Google Street View provoked a firestorm of controversy. The company dispatched camera-equipped cars to photograph street scenes for its mapping software, but many people feared it would catch them in compromising situations. The rock star Liam Gallagher of the band Oasis was forced to deny that one image was of himself drinking at a streetside café.3 The increased intrusiveness of technology has made us a society struggling to sort out the villains from the victims. In the United States, a fourteen-year-old girl in New Jersey was charged with child pornography after posting nude pictures of herself on the social networking Web site MySpace.com.
Such evolutionary leaps in technology have unsettling implications for privacy. And the exploding growth of the private intelligence industry represents yet another trend in the 100-year balance of power between private and government intelligence. In an increasingly fragmented geopolitical environment, the balance seems to be shifting away from governments and toward corporations and even private individuals, who have access to more intelligence and information-gathering ability than many governments in history ever had.
What comes next?
I asked Peter Earnest, a retired CIA officer who serves as the executive director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Earnest sees corporate espionage as a natural outgrowth of increased globalization and an ever-increasing demand for information. Over the coming years, he says, intelligence operations will be ever more effective. “Spying doesn’t change; the tactics have been the same throughout human history,” he says. “But the technology keeps getting better and better.”
Even after meeting many of the top corporate spies in the world, exposing operations that many of them did not want exposed, and poring over the history of their industry, I’m still conflicted about whether all this is headed in a positive direction for society. As a journalist, I’m a strong believer in the importance of gathering information. And I’m a fundamentalist when it comes to the First Amendment. But what separates me, and reporters like me, from the corporate spies is that we believe in making sure the information we report reaches the widest possible audience. Spies do the opposite: they make sure the details they harvest reach only a very narrow—and very high-paying—audience.
I don’t think that’s always good for society. So I’ll offer one modest suggestion. The spy firms must be dragged farther into public view, where citizens can keep an eye on whether what they’re doing is constructive or destructive.
There’s one way this could be done. Today, American lobbyists must register with Congress, revealing to the public how much they’re getting paid, who their clients are, and what they’re trying to accomplish. When they were put into place in the mid-1990s, the regulations were hotly resisted by Washington’s lobbying community. But they have helped to clean up an industry, and made it easier for the media and the public to spot the problem firms before these firms can do too much damage.
A spy registry modeled on the lobbying disclosure rules could be coordinated by the SEC, which already processes millions of pages of public disclosure documents from public companies every year. Free markets do work best without friction, and a big source of friction in the economy is misinformation. The ability of investors and corporate leaders to stamp out confusion in the market by finding out the truth of a situation helps boost confidence, speed transactions, and prevent prices from spiraling too high or too low.
It’s time